The sea, the sky, the veins of your hands, the earth itself when photographed from space . . . Blue sometimes seems to overwhelm all the other shades of our world in its all-encompassing presence.

The blues of Blue Mythologies include those present in the world’s religions, a robin’s egg, science, slavery, gender, sex, art, literature and contemporary film. Carol Mavor’s engaging and elegiac readings in this beautifully illustrated book are at once sociological, literary, historical and visual, taking the reader from the blue of a new-born baby's eyes to Giotto’s frescoes at Padua, and from the films of Derek Jarman and Krzysztof Kieślowski to the islands of Venice and Aran.

In each example Mavor unpicks meaning both above and below the surface of culture. In an echo of Roland Barthes’ essays in Mythologies, blue is unleashed as our most familiar and most paradoxical colour. Blue Mythologies gives us a fresh and contemplative look into the traditions, tales and connotations of those somethings blue.

‘What is it about blue that prompts a precious kind of reverie, just a sigh away (or maybe not) from whimsy? It’s surely the hue of bright modernity: blue jeans, blue-liveried liners on blue seas under blue skies, a blurry blue world seen from space. Of course, all those new blues are now old ones: 20th-century blues. There are blues and blues, chromo-culturally speaking, and Carol Mavor’s Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour is all about infinite or involuted meanings, the plunge into a blue that Rebecca Solnit, in her Field Guide to Getting Lost, calls “the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in.” Blue, in Mavor’s vertiginous essay, is not so much an object of art-historical analysis as an energy or atmosphere, the very mood in which [Mavor] thinks and writes.’ – Brian Dillon, Modern Painters

‘[an] evocative new book – a work which wanders at will over a world of blue. Mavor’s book could hardly be less constrained by its divided subject. Hers is a stream of consciousness, illustrated by a lavish wash of colour reproductions’ – Times Higher Education

‘Mavor offers an engaging and poetic exploration of the color blue. Like Joseph Cornell assembling one of his boxes, Mavor articulates this metaphorical exploration in a series of short chapters. As expected, the symbolic meanings and psychological effects of the color are introduced. Less expected is the wide range of media, including literature; music; poetry; film; objects; places; and individuals. Theory, notably that of Roland Barthes (whose Mythologies inspired the book’s structure) is integrated skillfully so as not to interrupt the reader’s progress. Recommended.’ – Choice

‘Describing a color is the challenge Carol Mavor takes up in Blue Mythologies, and more obliquely in Black and Blue, and she does it beautifully. These two books are the latest blossoms Mavor has cultivated, works that confirm the tenderness of her critical passions. She is a kissing cousin of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Susan Stewart, in her attention to touch and affect, in her sensitivity to her own emotions and sense perceptions in her apprehension of art. So, for an art historian in particular, her work is singular, unusually labile, sensuous, associative . . .’ – Critical Quarterly

‘In Blue Mythologies, Carol Mavor provides her own “reflections” on blue, as her subtitle reads, employing as a guide no discernible chronology but for the admirable compass of her own affective and intellectual sensibilities . . . Mavor has developed a style that marries the erudition of scholarly writing with the intimacy of a diary . . . illustrated throughout by lavish reproductions of everything from 14th century frescoes to 21st century contemporary daguerreotypes, Mavor is at her somersaulting best, moving effortlessly between disciplines . . . The success of her book is to coax us into having a less complacent attitude to our own contradictory investments, even when it comes to something as apparently innocuous as a color.’ – Los Angeles Review of Books

‘An exciting literary treasure hunt that maps out the color blue as a pathway to experience and memory.’ – Shelfawareness

‘Carol Mavor’s work is the closest to that of Roland Barthes we are ever likely to have. What I like about it is that it is as “artistic” as the art which is its subject matter. Carol Mavor not only studies “blue”, she bleeds it.’ – Hayden White, Emeritus Professor of the History of Consciousness, University of California

‘What is it about blue that prompts a precious kind of reverie, just a sigh away (or maybe not) from whimsy? It’s surely the hue of bright modernity: blue jeans, blue-liveried liners on blue seas under blue skies, a blurry blue world seen from space. Of course, all those new blues are now old ones: 20th-century blues. There are blues and blues, chromo-culturally speaking, and Carol Mavor’s Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour is all about infinite or involuted meanings, the plunge into a blue that Rebecca Solnit, in her Field Guide to Getting Lost, calls “the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in.” Blue, in Mavor’s vertiginous essay, is not so much an object of art-historical analysis as an energy or atmosphere, the very mood in which [Mavor] thinks and writes.’ – Brian Dillon, Modern Painters

‘[an] evocative new book – a work which wanders at will over a world of blue. Mavor’s book could hardly be less constrained by its divided subject. Hers is a stream of consciousness, illustrated by a lavish wash of colour reproductions’ – Times Higher Education

‘Mavor offers an engaging and poetic exploration of the color blue. Like Joseph Cornell assembling one of his boxes, Mavor articulates this metaphorical exploration in a series of short chapters. As expected, the symbolic meanings and psychological effects of the color are introduced. Less expected is the wide range of media, including literature; music; poetry; film; objects; places; and individuals. Theory, notably that of Roland Barthes (whose Mythologies inspired the book’s structure) is integrated skillfully so as not to interrupt the reader’s progress. Recommended.’ – Choice

‘Describing a color is the challenge Carol Mavor takes up in Blue Mythologies, and more obliquely in Black and Blue, and she does it beautifully. These two books are the latest blossoms Mavor has cultivated, works that confirm the tenderness of her critical passions. She is a kissing cousin of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Susan Stewart, in her attention to touch and affect, in her sensitivity to her own emotions and sense perceptions in her apprehension of art. So, for an art historian in particular, her work is singular, unusually labile, sensuous, associative . . .’ – Critical Quarterly

‘In Blue Mythologies, Carol Mavor provides her own “reflections” on blue, as her subtitle reads, employing as a guide no discernible chronology but for the admirable compass of her own affective and intellectual sensibilities . . . Mavor has developed a style that marries the erudition of scholarly writing with the intimacy of a diary . . . illustrated throughout by lavish reproductions of everything from 14th century frescoes to 21st century contemporary daguerreotypes, Mavor is at her somersaulting best, moving effortlessly between disciplines . . . The success of her book is to coax us into having a less complacent attitude to our own contradictory investments, even when it comes to something as apparently innocuous as a color.’ – Los Angeles Review of Books

‘An exciting literary treasure hunt that maps out the color blue as a pathway to experience and memory.’ – Shelfawareness

‘Carol Mavor’s work is the closest to that of Roland Barthes we are ever likely to have. What I like about it is that it is as “artistic” as the art which is its subject matter. Carol Mavor not only studies “blue”, she bleeds it.’ – Hayden White, Emeritus Professor of the History of Consciousness, University of California